What a Piece of Junk

Rating: 3/10 (19 August 2013)

"Pacific Rim" is a simply terrible piece of summer movie junk food from a director I expected much more from.
In a plot that really isn't that much like "Avatar" yet managed to feel like a rip-off of it, humans have waged war on a bunch of big monsters from the deep by building giant robots and controlling them with their minds. For the robots to work, they need to be piloted by two people, and it's important that those two people are as psychically linked as possible in order to be effective. Guillermo Del Toro, who made one of my favorite action movies ever ("Hellboy II"), could, I thought, be trusted to bring just the right blend of style, comedy and characterization to make this film rise above the summer fray. But this movie is lacking in all three, instead substituting thunderous sound and visual effects, apparently in an attempt to numb its audience into submission so that we no longer care whether or not what we're watching makes any sense.
I felt the same way watching this movie as I did watching last year's "Prometheus." It's like Del Toro conceived this elaborate story in his head and then made only the second half of it into a movie. The feeling is not unlike coming into the second of a two-part miniseries, where you know what you're watching would make a lot more sense if you had seen it from the beginning.
Grade: D